MUH-rukh
An Irish mermaid or merman, said to wear a magical cap that lets them pass between sea and land.
The merrow (from murúch, "sea maiden") lives beneath the waves and comes ashore by removing a magical cap or cloak; a human who steals it can supposedly compel the merrow to stay on land as a wife or husband, echoing the selkie tales of Scotland. Merrow men are traditionally described as considerably less comely than the women.
Merrows are usually described as seen at the coast, and the female merrow is said to be beautiful, with green hair and a fish tail. In the nineteenth-century collections of Thomas Crofton Croker, merrows wear a red cap, called the cohuleen druith, that lets them travel under the sea. If it is lost or stolen, they cannot go home.
Stories often show merrows marrying fishermen and raising families on land, until the wife finds her cap again and returns to the water. The tale is a close relative of the selkie legends of Scotland and Orkney, and it probably owes some of its shape to old ideas about the sea as a place that both gives and takes.
Read more: Creatures of Irish mythology →
| Cycle | Entries here | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| The Mythological Cycle | 21 | The oldest of the four cycles, telling of the Tuatha Dé Danann and the successive invasions of Ireland. |
| The Fenian Cycle | 7 | Tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his band of warriors, the Fianna, set generations after the Ulster Cycle in a world of hunting, romance, and roaming adventure. |
| The Ulster Cycle | 12 | The heroic tales of Conchobar mac Nessa's court at Emain Macha, centered on Cú Chulainn and the great cattle raid of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. |
| The Historical Cycle | 1 | Also the Cycle of the Kings — legendary and semi-legendary tales of Ireland's High Kings, treated by medieval scribes as genuine national history. |
The Merrow (Murúch) is the Irish version of a mermaid or merman, said to wear a special cap (a cohuleen druith) that allows passage between the sea and human world, and which must be kept safe if the merrow is to return to the water.
Female merrows are generally described as beautiful and gentle, sometimes marrying human men after their cap is hidden away, while male merrows are traditionally depicted as far more grotesque and are associated with storms and shipwrecks.
According to the folklore, a merrow cannot return to the sea without her cohuleen druith, which is the basis for stories in which a fisherman hides a merrow wife's cap to keep her on land — until she eventually finds it and returns to the water, sometimes after years.